The size of the crowd in part was a response to the recent silencing of Irish priests.

One of those silenced, Fr Tony Flannery, was part of the leadership team of the ACP.

A second, Fr Brian D'Arcy, was a weekly columnist in tabloid newspaper,The Sunday World. It turned out that someone in the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith had been trawling through decades of the paper to check D'Arcy's articles.

Two other stories provided a backdrop to the meeting.

One was a TV program which revealed that in 1975 when he was a bishop's secretary, Cardinal Sean Brady, now Primate of Ireland, was given the names of some boys abused by Fr Brendan Smyth during a canonical investigation, and failed to report this either to the parents or to the police.

Smyth, the abuser being investigated, continued to prey on children for a further 18 years.

In fact the Cardinal had passed all the information up to his bishop and was devastated when he learnt that Smyth had not been stopped.

He rejected calls for his resignation. Several commentators pointed out that had he called for a discussion on women priests the Vatican would have promptly given him his marching orders, as Bishop Morris in Australia found to his cost.

A second story concerned Fr Kevin Reynolds.

RTE, the national broadcaster, had accused him in a program of fathering a child by an underage woman in Africa.

Reynolds denied the charge and offered to take a paternity test in advance of the program.

This was refused.

Eventually, RTE was forced to publish an abject apology, pay an undisclosed sum for libel, and was subjected to a withering public report. Several staff resigned. Continue reading

Sources

• Brian Lennon S.J. in Eureka Street
• Image: Enlighthened Catholicism

The apology stated that, on May 23rd last, RTÉ broadcast a Prime Time programme "A Mission to Prey", which accused Fr Kevin Reynolds, parish priest at Ahascragh, Galway, of raping a minor while a missionary in Kenya and fathering a child as a result.

Before the broadcast, Fr Reynolds had made repeated but fruitless efforts to alert the Prime Time journalists to the falsity of the allegations, even offering to undergo a paternity test. RTÉ's apology acknowledged that the programme should not have been broadcast and said it "fully and unreservedly" accepted that Fr Reynolds was "entirely innocent", that the allegations were "baseless, without any foundation whatever and untrue".

The apology could hardly be more explicit in its admission of error, but, had he not been able definitively to demonstrate his innocence with a paternity test, the programme would have cast Fr Reynolds forever among the growing legions of discredited Catholic clerics.

The allegations seemed of a piece with the broader picture, sketched out over several years in Irish media, of predatory priests abusing their power and positions. The "victims" had spoken out, and victims, as we know, are always to be believed. The priest denied it, but he would, wouldn't he?

This goes beyond slackness. There was no apology for the title of the programme: "A Mission to Prey". Here, the allegations against Fr Reynolds acquired an added dimension of toxicity, imputing to him and implicitly to other Catholic missionaries an abominable premeditation.

Behind the priestly vocation and outward altruism of church initiatives in foreign countries, that title insinuated, is a grotesque design to abuse and exploit. The title echoes a malevolent mentality now rampant in the Irish media, which, where the church is concerned, no longer considers it enough to state facts - the case must be augmented with sneers and vicious innuendos.

Carefully nurtured public prejudice ensures that, when condemning a church figure, it's impossible to go too far.

Full Article: Irish Times